I grew up watching commercials for cereals touting their fortified nutrition benefits, like this Special K commercial. I didn't know what all of those vitamins were supposed to do, but I figured I must need them.

Fast forward 40 years and I'm a vegetarian with celiac disease. As you likely know, fortified breads and cereals are a primary source of B vitamins in the standard American diet, with meat and dairy products rounding out the top sources. This means that I and anyone on a gluten-free diet (especially vegetarians or vegans) need to bring extra intention to getting B vitamins.

B vitamins as a group -- there are eight with names like thiamine, niacin and riboflavin -- serve to aid digestion, metabolism and convert foods to energy production. B vitamins are water soluble and not readily stored in the body, meaning we need to be eating them regularly to stay on top of that dietary need.

My answer? Nutritional yeast. It's got that umami thing going on -- umami being loosely translated from Japanese as "pleasant savory taste." I've developed a pretty tasty marinade and salad dressing. In one 30 calorie serving, it really boosts the B's.

Vitamin B-12 50.0 %

Vitamin B-6 187.1 %

Niacin 124.0 %

Riboflavin 240.3 %

Thiamin 273.6 %

And even though I started using nutritional yeast for the health benefits, it really does have a pleasant savory taste. Jenn and my 11-year-old son likes my special sauce on sauteed veggies and tofu.

Ingredients:

1 Tablespoon Nutritional Yeast1 Teaspoon yellow mustard1/2 Teaspoon tamari saucepinch of garlic saltsprinkle of chipotle chili pepper to tasteDirections:Combine the ingredients. Use as a marinade for tofu before pan-frying or sauteing with broccoli, Brussels sprouts, or cauliflower. Or just put it on your food -- Use it just mixed as a salad dressing or veggie dip, or toss with sauteed or roasted veggies immediately before serving.

I am a mom to two boys, 11 and 13-years-old. They may want to make something that I'll like but that they'll like too in honor of Mother's Day. I decided to shop the recipes that were offered at Cindy Gordon's www.VegetarianMamma.com Gluten-Free Fridays link ups from the last couple of weeks to assemble a nice Mother's Day dinner menu that my kids could make and that I (and they) would want to eat.

My criteria:

Vegetarian or easy to leave the meat out

Ingredients I am likely to have on hand or have some familiarity with

Easy enough prep that I could actually point my boys to it and let them make it, without copious hovering

I would consider eating/drinking it, at least one day a year

Spinach Strawberry Salad with Poppy Seed Dressing. Now that the farm share is starting to roll in again, we are awash in spinach and other greens. Not sure both boys would be into this as a salad, but I fully expect it could served in a deconstructed format with ranch dressing (for at least one boy) optional. The other one would totally eat this.

Easy Sauteed Brussels Sprouts. I love Brussels sprouts. My partner loves Brussels spouts. I would fill my plate with 3/4's of this, telling the boys that I want to leave more Mac and Cheese for them. I'm thoughtful and generous that way.

Frosty Peach Shake. Dessert! I would encourage the freezer pop option so that a reasonable amount of time could pass between Mac N Cheese and this. I'd point the boys to the 1% milk instead of the almond milk -- I've read that other "milks" might not set up well. Though I guess if it's frozen it would. Whatever.

May is Celiac Awareness Month. I offer these two resources to share, pin, like, etc. If you have celiac disease, the slide is for you to use to help educate others, and the video is to support you in having the conversation with your family about the need for them to get tested. There are additional excellent resources from the National Foundation for Celiac Awareness at www.SeriouslyCeliac.org.

Oh, and the background pic on the slide is my poor flattened villi from 5 years ago. They are much happier now!

Here's my answer to not standing in front of the stove making pancakes in small batches. I didn't start out to replace the gluten-free pancake breakfast, but that's what I did. Serendipity!

I actually invented this recipe when I came across a thing called blueberry pudding cake, which involved a lot of ingredients and pouring boiling water over everything before putting it in the oven for an hour. No no no. Too much stuff. Too long. This is similar but took no time and is pretty awesome. In the end, I'm still sort of intrigued by the blueberry pudding cake idea (stay tuned!), but this is definitely remaining in the repertoire.

Spray a glass pie pan with non-stick cooking spray (I actually forgot to do this and it came out pretty well anyway.) Place the blueberries in the bottom of the pan (mine worked out to be a single layer thick.)

Pour the pancake mixture over the blueberries.

Bake for 25 minutes or until the top is light brown and looks like a big pancake.

Let cool for a couple of minutes, but not too long! Dish it out, add a little maple syrup if you like, and wish you had some whipped cream to top it with.

This is not an atypical way I proceed through a baking project. I know many more experienced bakers have come before me, so I usually start with some basics from a recipe that I’ve found that sort of sounds like what I want and I alter it (sometimes significantly) from there. Sometimes I make a colossal mistake and manage to make a save in the end. Take my recent foray into peanut butter cookies, for example. My younger son Scott and I had made Ovenly’s Salted Peanut Butter Cookies a few weeks before from a recipe my partner Jenn had clipped from the newspaper. I thought the cookies were very good, but thought they might be even BETTER if they had chocolate chips and maybe some oats mixed in. This is the sort of thinking that gets me into trouble. At 6:30 am on this particular Saturday, I couldn’t find the clipped recipe, so I went to the google machine. If it had been in the paper, surely it was also on-line, right? I came up with this: http://munchies.vice.com/recipes/peanut-butter-cookies. Go look there now. Bookmark this page because you’ll want to make the original version some time. Note the very pretty font, and how artful it makes the numbers look. Now imagine you are 50 and looking at it on your iPhone and you’re not wearing your reading glasses. Proceed apace. 6:35 am – Find the recipe on your phone and begin amassing the ingredients on the counter top: Five ingredients, plus the addition of chocolate chips and maybe oats. Decide to double the recipe. 6:37 am – You preheat the oven to 350 and remember from last time that your brown sugar is rock hard. Google “How to soften rock hard brown sugar.” 6:40 am – Check the recipe and carefully measure ¾’s of a cup X 2 of brown sugar on a plate, cover with a damp paper towel and microwave until soft. Fail to notice that you’ve misread the quantity of sugar you need. 6:45 am – While the sugar is softening, put two eggs in each pocket of your jeans to quickly bring them to room temperature. Pat yourself on the back for being so clever to think of this the last time you made these cookies and having it work so well when there was just one egg per pocket. 6:46 am – Drop the kitchen towel. Bend over to get it. Hear/feel an egg break in your right pocket. Stand upright and immediately fish the eggs out of your right pocket. Assess that only one egg broke, and, thanks to that weird egg membrane thing, discover that most of the goodness of the broken egg is still contained. Salvage what you can. You decide that there is enough egg substance to not add more egg. Put a dry paper towel in your pocket to absorb the wet egg. Take the other two eggs out of your left pocket. Decide that they are warm enough already, dammit. Make a mental note to not do this with more than one egg per pocket again. 6:50 am – Add the warm and soft brown sugar, eggs and vanilla in a medium bowl and whisk them together. Since the recipe calls for even parts sugar and peanut butter, you measure ¾’s cup X 2 of Skippy and begin mixing, feeling kind of smug that you have the exact brand name that the authors suggest. Last time, you used a mixer (trying to mitigate the chunks of rock hard brown sugar), but this time you decide to just mix by hand as the recipe directs. 6:55 am – You note that the batter/dough is much runnier than last time. You decide it’s because you are mixing by hand. You get out the mixer. The batter/dough remains runny, nothing like the Playdoh consistency they suggest. You disregard the evidence in front of you that something might be amiss. You decide to skip the chocolate and oats for this first pan and proceed dripping the mixture onto the parchment paper-lined baking pan. 7:00 am – After drizzling the batter into circles on 2/3rds of the baking pan, you finally put on your reading glasses and check the recipe again, noting your error and swearing off delicate, swirly fonts forever. You consider trying to scrape/pour the batter back into the bowl, but determine that the batter loss would be too substantial. You finish out the pan and put them into the oven. You suspect the cooking time of 16-18 minutes will be too long, so you set the timer for 11 minutes. 7:02 am – You realize that you forgot to sprinkle sea salt on the top. Take the pan out of the oven and sprinkle the blobs with salt. Put the pan back in the oven. Reset the timer for 10 minutes. 7:03 am – Drink some coffee. Decide to add equal yet random amounts of brown sugar and peanut butter to the remaining batter to see if you can rescue the batch. 7:07 am – Add in ¼ cup oats and spoon half of the now-Playdoh-like dough onto the pizza pan lined with parchment paper. Forget to add the salt. Put them in the oven. Set a second timer for 13 minutes. Peek at the PB blobs to assess their likelihood of being food later. Leave them in the oven. 7:10 am – Add ¼ cup of chocolate chips to the remaining cookie dough. Drink coffee and browse facebook while waiting for the timer on the first pan. Decide that buying in a second cookie sheet might be worth the investment. 7:12 am – Turn off the timer. Check the first pan. Decide to leave them in a little longer. Reset the timer for 3 minutes. Return to Facebook. 7:15 am – Turn off the timer. Decide that the first batch of cookies are done. Take them out and set the cookie sheet on a cooking rack. 7:17 am – Without waiting long enough, slide the sheet of cookie-laden parchment paper directly onto the rack so that you can use the cookie sheet to pan the last of the dough. 7:18 am – Line the pan with parchment paper. Spoon out the chocolate-chip-peanut butter-oats dough. Remember to add the salt on top. Peek at the pizza pan of cookies. Decide to move them to the bottom shelf and put the last batch in the oven on the top shelf. Set the timer for 13 minutes. 7:19 am – Peel a peanut butter blob off the parchment paper and give it a try. Decide that they are edible and dub them peanut butter wafer cookies. Realize you forgot to take a picture of the wafers on rack and snap one anyway. 7:20 am – Turn off the timer and check the pizza pan cookies. Give them a couple more minutes. Drink coffee. Watch that adorable baby in the tub with dachshunds video. 7:23 am – Take the pizza pan cookies out of the oven. Slide the parchment of cookies immediately to a cooling rack since it looks like they might be a little too brown on the bottom. 7:30 am – Sample a pb-oats cookie. Decide they are awesome. Be very self-satisfied. 7:32 am – Take the final pan of salted choco-oats-pb cookies out of the oven. Turn the oven off. 7:35 am – Split one of the final cookies with your son, who has wandered downstairs in his pajama bottoms to see what smells so good. Declare the warm cookies to be maybe the best ever created. 7:37 am – Know that you will never be able to replicate these cookies. Be pleased anyway, because you can probably get close to replicating them. Forget to take a picture. By the time you remember, your appreciative family will have eaten all but the weird peanut butter wafer cookies. There you have it. Bake on!

Call me a rebel. For many a holiday dessert, we make apple crisp. This past Thanksgiving, I was sort of in the mood for pumpkin pie. I decided this on Thanksgiving morning. Making a pie crust needs a bit of forethought, in my opinion. Casting about my kitchen, my eyes landed on the box of Trader Joe's gluten-free Pumpkin Pancake mix. Aha! Perhaps I could get that pumpkin hankering taken care of by combining the two concepts!

In my world, I frequently base decisions after answering this question: "What's the worst that can happen?" In this case, it would be that the gluten-eaters would eat the other desserts offered and I would pick the topping off of baked apples. This was a risk I could live with. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?

Place the cut-up apples in a baking dish. In a separate bowl, combine the mix, brown sugar and butter, using a pastry and dough cutter, a knife and fork or your fingertips, working it lightly so that it doesn't become oily. Spread over the apples. Bake at 350 for 40 minutes.

I spend a lot of my free time reading books or web material, listening to recordings, or watching Ted Talks and videos about the shifting nature of our world. There is so much science-based, thoughtful information out there about how happiness, work, business and fulfillment are all constructed a bit differently than we have been lead to believe.

Happiness comes before the acquisition of stuff (Shawn Achor)

Job satisfaction comes from creativity, and connection (Seth Godin)

Employment now is different than it was 30 years ago – showing up on time and doing a good job doesn’t guarantee that your job will always be there for you (Seth Godin)

We all want all of this, right? But we also want security, the avoidance of discomfort and the unknown, and to not look foolish. How do we get from where things feel safe and familiar but lacking to happy and fulfilled? It’s all about accepting the fact that personal growth feels kind of yucky. But in knowing that it’s supposed to feel un-good helps it feel better. Sort of like when I realized that my crazed state of late had plenty to do with hormonal swings and not actual insanity. Just knowing it was a menopause thing made it that much better. The hot flashes are still unpleasant, but I know they won’t kill me. Likewise, for those of us who have gotten a celiac disease diagnosis, we have what I affectionately call “The Year of Freaking Out.” We think that the huge dietary shift to gluten-free will end life as we know it. We hate it at first. Then we adapt. We find our new normal. Some of us go so far as to embrace it and turn it into our Day Job. (Okay, that was me.) With the right mindset, we can turn crisis into opportunity. When I first started blogging, I was painfully self-conscious about it. The benefits outweighed the discomfort, so I kept at it. It got comfortable. I kept at it and made it a real “thing.” So now, What’s next? New things come along that demand we leave our comfort zone. Sometimes these things will come out of left field. Sometimes they are largely of our own making. Frequently, others can see them coming at us when we are oblivious. Doesn't matter. They come nevertheless. And it's natural to resist. Overcoming the resistance and finding the gift is the key. For me, I know that sometimes I’m the one to decide that I need to be the change I need to see in my world. My happiness is worth it. It’s really not about getting there after all. It’s about the journey. Seth Godin thinks so too.

It was a whirlwind trip to Orlando for a conference. The Marriott World Center is a city unto itself -- one of those places where one can have a completely encapsulated stay and never set foot off the property, which I didn't.

In the shadows of the Disney empire, I'm sure they can't help but get swept up in the swirling vortex of epic customer service provided by the happiest place on earth. This was to my extreme advantage. I called the day I was to arrive to see what they could do about a safe gluten-free vegetarian box lunch the next day. I was connected with Senior Catering Manager Chris Greer, who was funny and engaging and assured me that they are seasoned pros at accommodating requests such as mine.

First though I needed to navigate Friday dinner. There are, like, four restaurants at this place, plus a food court. The sports bar, called High Velocity, was the only one that didn't have a significant wait time. I was skeptical but knew that I had food I'd brought from home in the fridge in my room if it got too dicy. It turned out to be no problem. I had the veggie wrap fillings on gluten-free bread, which might have been Rudi's or Udi's, which aren't the best with moist fillings. The combo was a little bit of a miss and I wish I'd gone with a salad. The server was very knowledgable and volunteered that fries were safe -- dedicated fryer! -- so I had some. It's been awhile since I had real fries, so that was a treat. and made up for the sandwich.

Then the real test: Conference boxed lunch. Aside from labeling my meal "Chair" instead of Claire, which I thought was pretty funny, I was not dissappointed. I had a veggie wrap -- my guess is that it was a Rudi's GF tortilla, but can't be sure. This worked much better than the sandwich the night before. Apple, Lay's Potato Chips and a pack of Enjoy Life double chocolate cookies. Nothing to not like.

Then Saturday dinner. We'd made reservations at Mikado Japanese Restaurant. This is one of those places where the chef cooks at your table, flipping and juggling spatulas, knives, shrimp tails, whatever. the place was awash in soy sauce. Frankly, it didn't look promising. I did my usual patter with our server: "I have celiac disease, and I need a super strict gluten-free diet or I will get very ill. Do you have a gluten-free menu?" Like the sports bar, they don't have a dedicated gluten-free menu, but she assured me they could handle my needs.

Next thing I know, Chef Jason was at my elbow, talking me through it, Noting their use of tamari sauce and offering to prepare my tofu, veggies & fried rice in the kitchen away from the sea of soy sauce at the table. I said yes.

Like the other guests in my party, I appreciated the show provided by the chef at our table. He made an impressive-looking volcano out of onions stacked conically. He bantered. He flipped his utensils. He served everyone. My food arrived a little after. I used the wait time to educate my dining companions about celiac disease. My dinner arrived and was hot, tasty and filling. I couldn't have asked for better.

Overall, I felt well taken care of and was impressed by the overall knowledge that the food service staff possessed. I have no hesitation recommending the Marriott World Center to gluten-free travelers.

I've been doing a lot of writing, but mostly now I do it for my work at the National Foundation for Celiac Awareness. We produce a lot of information, much for the website www.celiaccentral.org, and lots for other publications and uses. I really enjoy it! I try to cross list my "first person" stuff here. For example, in this Erewhon Buckwheat and Hemp Cereal Hot Products post I harken back to the Wheaties of my childhood. It's not the same as posting here, but still satisfying.

Since I'm doing for my Day Job what I once was striving to do for my extra-curricular work, I've been waiting for inspiration about how to move forward here. I was letting things simmer, but then my modest Happy Healthy Gluten-Free Facebook page started taking off with no real push from me. I was very pleased though. Clearly it meant that somehow, somewhere, people were finding me and appreciating my stories enough to click the Like button.

Buoyed, I decided to get back to blogging. So, today, if I have time, I'll post this AND my recipe for Crispy Brown Rice Horny Toads. My thoughtful essays usually don't get much traffic. The recipes always do. Philosophical musings can be a bit in the "navel gazing" category, after all.

My big light bulb of late is that for me, and maybe for everyone, I react to all change that is out of my control in the same way: Denial, Anger, Bargaining. Depression and Acceptance. Unfortunately, Elizabeth Kubler Ross beat me to actually writing down the model and getting all the credit. And you probably know that she was all about grief and loss in the face of death and dying. In fact, her big book was called On Death and Dying. I'm talking about much smaller stuff though.

I often refer to a person's first year with a celiac disease diagnosis as the "Year of Freaking Out." It's that time when you have to reorient your whole world around something you do 3, 4, 5 times a day -- eating. Life is now significantly different than you'd thought it would be. Mostly it's better because you are getting healthier, but at first it seems like a terrible life sentence. Then you sort of go through the Kubler-Ross stages and a new normal emerges and you manage, mostly okay, most of the time.

I've now gotten my first-hand introduction to menopause. I know it's rather pedestrian to mention. It's hardly a unique situation. I know I'll survive it. But I am strenuously resisting it! The stupidist thing is that menopause jacks up your hormones in such a weird way that you think that the anxiety attack you are having is somehow a reasonable thing to have going on inside, and dang it, it's just not. With everything in my life actually going exceptionally well, I'm totally pissed off that I can't enjoy it more because of my wacky hormones. I do have to say that this past year post-hysterectomy-but-with-ovaries has been downright awesome. No period and no menopause? I'm just a little jealous of the males of our species right now.

The holistic remedy for this, as with most things, include the novel ideas of exercise, good nutrition, drinking enough water, and mindfulness/meditation. Yeah, yeah. Next you'll tell me that spending time in nature, taking baths, drinking herbal tea and petting the dog will help too. Oh wait. Those things are actually pretty awesome. It's my hormones telling me that they suck! I do need to visit my GP to figure out what the latest lore on HRT is, but generally I'm disinclined if I can manage without.